When a company buys advertising space or time from a media seller, it includes specific instructions in regards to where, when and how this advertising should be delivered. These instructions are compiled after extensive research using various different tools, and, from the advertising buyer's perspective, best reflects its advertising goals and represents the optimal use of its advertising budget. The cost of the advertising is also directly related to the type and extent of campaign delivery instructions.
These instructions may include the dates and time of day in which the advertising is to be launched or delivered, the number of times the advertisement should be delivered, the type of audience it should be delivered to the location of the advertising, the frequency in which it should be delivered and other various rules, policies and conventions which the advertising should adhere to. The order which the advertiser places with the media seller that contains these instructions and that is accepted by the media seller is usually referred to as an “Insertion Order” (IO). An insertion order usually consists of various placements with each placement representing a different insertion. The Insertion Order represents the written contract between the advertising buyer and the seller pertaining to this advertisement campaign.
The advertising seller delivers the advertisements to its website on the world-wide-web or other form of digital media using a computer program usually referred to as an ad server. Every web page that should display advertising contents has one or more ad server tags embedded within its code (in the background). This ad server tag is a piece of code that calls a remote advertising server that delivers the advertisements to the page. This ad tag sends information to the ad server about the page and about the user accessing this page. The ad server selects the appropriate ad to deliver from a large bank of advertisements by matching the most appropriate advertisement, based on the definitions of the insertion orders and placements, with the corresponding user and page based on the information passed to it by the website.
Because of the complexities of the insertion orders, the short timeframe usually available to set up the campaigns and because of other technological challenges, the actual delivery of the ads can frequently differ from the instructions specified in the insertion order. These inconsistencies can cost advertising buyers many millions of dollars of advertising budget wastage.
Another conventional way for monitoring is known as “Tracking Pixel” (TP—a method for tracking actions, according to which the advertiser places an image tag representing a pixel on the page that is displayed immediately after the action being tracked), which is an invisible point that can be used to identify the origin website. However, this way is very limited, since many inconsistencies (such as the location of the ad within the web-page, simultaneously displaying competitive advertisements on the same page, fraud display of an ad, covered by another ad etc.) may not be identified. Moreover, ads delivered within Inline Frames (IFrames—HTML documents embedded inside another HTML document on a website. The IFrame HTML element is often used to insert content from another source, such as an advertisement, into a Web page), and even nested IFrames, because of IFrames security definitions, do not disclose the URL of the site the ad was delivered to, thus not allowing to identify the visited URL from the conventional and standard data of the Tracking pixel. Again, this causes advertisers to lose money.
All the methods described above have not yet provided satisfactory solutions to the problem of providing a method and system for automatic monitoring and verification advertising content, delivered over a data network, such as the Internet.
It is an object of the present invention to provide a method and system for automatic monitoring and verification advertising content, delivered over a data network.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method and system for automatically monitoring and verifying whether or not the advertising content optimally complies with the advertising Insertion Order defined by the advertiser.
It is another object of the present invention to provide a method and system for automatically monitoring and verifying whether or not the advertisement represents more optimal use of the advertising budget that corresponds to the Insertion Order defined by the advertiser
It is a further object of the present invention to provide a method and system for automatically monitoring and verifying that the instructions specified in the insertion order matches the advertiser's intent.
Other objects and advantages of the invention will become apparent as the description proceeds.